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Human history is full of common outbreaks. Epidemics, that is, human-to-human diseases, the root of the English infectious disease (pandemic) contains the meaning of "all people". And whenever the danger of the spread of diseases looms, "xenophobia" and racist thinking and phenomena spread. From the H1N1 flow in 2009 to the Ebola virus in 2014, it has been accompanied by not only diseases that all of humanity faces, but also widespread racist prejudices.
Social psychology research has found that the more significant the prevalence of infectious diseases, the more likely people are to develop non-positive attitudes towards foreigners, especially when the infectious disease shows that it will continue to spread over a long period of time. The COVID-19 outbreak eventually ushered in the pandemic era. When people feel that the disease will persist for a long time and will inevitably eventually infect themselves, it is easier to develop xenophobic social psychology. In this process, the media has played an important role in reproducing the disease and the ethnic groups in the places where the disease is occurring.
I. Manifestations of disease stigma and racial discrimination
On March 3, 2020, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proposed at a press conference in Geneva that the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside China was 8 times the number of confirmed cases in China on the same day. COVID-19 is already at risk of global spread. But, "to be honest, stigmatization is the most dangerous enemy compared to the virus itself." ”
In 1963, Owen Goffman conceptualized "stigma" in his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Damaged Identities. He proposes three types of stigma: one is physical deformities of physical disability; one is related to the blemishes of individual character; and the third is the tribal stigma of race (nation and religion). The third form of stigma is an indiscriminate identity attack on all people in a family, tribe, or group.
The virus that Dr. Tedros fears is more terrible than the coronavirus is the third form of stigma. The day after he delivered the speech, the British reported on the beatings of Singaporean students in London. At the time of infectious diseases, stigma and discrimination are closely linked. When an epidemic disease with uncertainty appears, stigmatization of the disease out of fear and self-protection is a group stress response. It labels and symbolizes others "in the name of illness", and obtains reasonable, scientific and civilized symbolic capital for discriminating against or even discriminating against others. This kind of behavior, in the media reports of this new crown pneumonia, has two representative cases so far. One is that Le Courier Picard, a local newspaper in France, used a picture of Chinese women wearing masks on its front page, not only with the text "Yellow Warning", but also in the news on the inside page using "The New Yellow Peril? as the title.
The racist term "yellow peril" came to history in the 19th century and was one of the reasons why western powers advocated invasion and colonization of China in the early 20th century. In the 19th century, extreme racists in the West claimed that yellow people would devour the "civilized" society of the West, that they were a threat to the white race, and that they thought it was the "yellow peril." This term, based on the theory of skin color and descent, has long been seen as a manifestation of discrimination against the people of East Asia by Western countries. Entering the 21st century of globalization and modernization, when infectious diseases came, this extreme racist word appeared in the media again, and even the Western media CNN published an article saying: "At this time, such words appear in reports of disease and death in Asia... It has also reached the extremes of racism."
Another common means of "stigmatization" in public health events is the risk of discrimination against regional and indigenous groups by naming diseases by location. The stigma associated with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and the Spanish flu deepens with each recurrence of the disease. The World Health Organization reviewed the impact of stigmatization on geographical names in its May 2015 Best Practices for Naming New Human Infectious Diseases, which calls on scientists, health authorities, and the media around the world to avoid adversely affecting a country or individual by the name of the disease. Because once the name of the disease is widely known to the public, it is difficult to change it. But even if there are scientific norms and propositions, the media will have a performance of dishonesty in the report. For example, the Economist published on January 30 ,"Will the Wuhan Virus Become an Epidemic?" report. The article not only printed the words "Made in China" above the title, but also covered the earth with a mask in the style of a Chinese flag. If before the World Health Organization announced on February 11 that the pneumonia infected by the new coronavirus was named "COVID-19", the media in various countries used "Wuhan pneumonia" because of the convenience of reporting, then after the 11th, "Wuhan pneumonia" and "Wuhan virus" were always used, which had the meaning of deliberately politicizing the disease metaphor and even creating discrimination. The international response chain of "COVID-19=Wuhan=China=Chinese=Chinese=Asian" brings prejudice and discrimination against all Asians. Marriage of geographical names to diseases is the most direct and convenient means of stigmatizing the "other".
On the other hand, in the face of this new crown pneumonia, self-stigmatization within the ethnic group is also a serious problem. As a result, patients and their groups are afraid to seek help because of stigma, resulting in psychological trauma within the community, and disease prevention and recovery are more difficult. If there is no objective, scientific and rational communication within the community in the face of disease, then this phenomenon is also easy to exploit by narrow racism.
The summary and reflection of global scholars on the SARS incident from 2002 to 2003 have certain comparative value for observing the media reproduction of the new crown pneumonia. In public health crises of global concern, media coverage plays a key role in sensing, managing and even defining crises. Global media coverage of infectious diseases not only shapes the global understanding of infectious diseases, but also shapes cultural memories about diseases as part of the cultural DNA. The coverage of epidemic diseases will eventually be linked to the image of the country and the nation, forming a metaphor for a nation. The metaphor of "disease is war" occupies a relatively dominant position in the conceptualization of disease. The same metaphor has the potential to serve different rhetorical intents, constructing different "others" from differences in the influence of disease. Because of the expression of politicized issues, China as the "other" provides a discursive basis for the metaphor of neo-racism. This is also the continuation of the "yellow peril theory" in the Western media whenever the disease breaks out. However, it is undeniable that in the outbreak of new crown pneumonia, China cooperated with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of various countries for the first time, showing the possibility of renewing cultural memory and building a community with a shared future for mankind in the face of major health emergencies.
Second, from the new crown pneumonia report, the performance of neo-racism in public health events and its theoretical analysis
After World War II, the danger of explicit nationalist rhetoric gradually became apparent, and for the sake of "political correctness", the Western media consciously avoided such remarks. Many scholars believe that after the end of the Cold War, the mainstream media in the West marginalized and constructed a negative image of developing countries in order to rationalize the sense of racial superiority of Western countries. But in fact, the media of various countries often have biased reports on political, economic and cultural, especially countries with ideological conflicts, and influence each other, constituting a crisis-ridden "other".
In 1995, the American scholar Dinash DeSoze tried to use cultural relativism as a way out and proposed "The End of Racism", which was opposed by many scholars. In fact, a non-public, hidden racial discrimination has developed in North America since the 1960s. "Neo-racism likes to target not 'Arabs' or 'negroes', but Arabs and blacks (perceived as) drug addicts, criminals, rapists, and so on; or rapists and criminals as 'Arabs' and 'negroes'". Thus, neo-racism differs from racism in that it is not based on natural factors based on race and based on physiology, but by subtle everyday discriminatory behaviours sustained by socially shared representations such as stereotypes, prejudices and ideologies. It is a product of the modern nation-state, the "racialization" of some social groups. Neo-racism, therefore, reflects the historical phenomenon of group exclusion and domination. Usually, cultural relativism seems to allow people to get along happily, but once the crisis comes, it is magnificent to isolate the "sick people" from daily life.
In the spread and reporting of diseases, neo-racism manifests itself in the form of "racialization" or "grouping" of outbreak groups or groups, thereby isolating them from normal groups. In the new racist discourse representation system of covid-19, it is a discourse strategy to criminalize the source of the disease and realize the isolation and discriminatory treatment of the sick group.
At present, scientists around the world have not yet determined the source of the new coronavirus, and the work of tracing the source of the outbreak is still underway. To this day, major scientific laboratories have no scientific explanation for the host of the virus and how it spreads to humans. But as with reports of AIDS and Ebola, the reappearance of epidemic diseases in the Western media in the past 20 years has often branded developing countries with "original sin."
In the media coverage of COVID-19, the "Made in China" virus is the first round of strong metaphors. Representative works include the satire of the Chinese flag published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The five stars on the Chinese flag on this screen are replaced by 5 virus-shaped symbols. Another representative work is the illustration of The Economist: a global covered by Masks of the Chinese flag. More notably, Fox TV host Jesse Waters used the binary expression of "civilization and barbarism" in the "Five" program to cite the reason why "China should formally apologize for the new crown pneumonia": the new coronavirus originated in China rather than the United States, because Chinese eat bats, snakes, and unclean, uncooked food. In Jesse Waters' discourse, he first defended Trump's closure of flights to China, criticizing some people for inappropriately calling it "racist" and thus justifying "racism": anything that benefits one's own ethnic group should not be considered in the definition of racism. It is then interpreted with the binary expression of "civilization and barbarism" and the example of "eating bats", which once again proves that isolating China is not racist. Finally, he cites a New York Times report claiming that Chinese "dishonest and deceitful" to illustrate the seriousness and correctness of his views. Here, the racist rhetoric that "Chinese backward and barbaric — so Chinese eat bats — so Chinese spread the virus" is very much in line with the new racist discourse system of the Western media during the spread of Ebola. In the face of the threat of disease, discriminatory rhetoric based on racism based on descent gives way to the "sick community" system of speech.
When Jeff and Joffe & Haarhoff analyzed newspaper reports on the Ebola outbreak, they found that all articles about Ebola in the UK mention Africa, with almost half linking it to monkeys and the other half to the lack of proper medical facilities there. Poverty, pollution, forest environments and tribal rituals, etc., due to the spread of the Ebola virus, are used to symbolize Africa, which means that the outbreak of such disasters is "indisputably" "self-inflicted" to symbolize the superiority of the West. The trauma and injustices inflicted on Africa due to colonization have been lost in reports of diseases. The outbreak of the new coronavirus pneumonia, with bats eating and wearing a mask with the virus symbolizing China and Chinese also produced the image of "incurable" "Chinese patients" in the same discourse system.
Worcester has been questioned and criticized by the US media for repeatedly making racist remarks, but this remark has not been attacked by the MAINSTREAM media in the Us. Only Newsweek, the mainstream media in the United States, reported on the matter, and only briefly described the scene and reported the matter with "We called Fox News and the other party did not comment", which is a so-called objectivity. The New York Times, cited by Vox, did not speak out about its racist remarks. The only British reporter was the British tabloid Daily Mail. It used "wild spraying" in news headlines to ridicule the Seriousness of the Chinese Government's demand for Waters' apology, and put quotation marks on the Chinese Government's evaluation of the matter such as "arrogance", "prejudice" and "ignorance" to express disapproval of China's views. In line with Waters's glorification of "racism," the Daily Mail described the Chinese government's criticism of Waters' remarks as "labelling" in a subtitle. The text uses the Chinese government's "condemnation" of Waters, and Waters's only half-joking tone to make this already routine discriminatory remarks trivial and minimized.
Formal metaphors of neo-racism
In the description of the relationship between "racism and disease", the United Nations handbook Dimensions of Racism argues that race, class and gender all have a decisive impact on a person's health and well-being, as they affect people's perception of the disease, the way they seek treatment, and their access to help. The treatment of diseases in modern society also has a Matthew effect. We can think that the more developed the scientific, technological, economic, and political governance capabilities, the more advantages individuals and ethnic groups have in the prevention and cure of diseases. But to think otherwise that ethnic, social or gender groups that are relatively disadvantaged in the prevention and cure of disease is backward, ignorant or even "inferior" is a racist argument. Thus, when epidemics arrive, the modern treatment of the disease is inextricably linked to the perception of racial concepts, the construction of the nation-state, and the rise of nationalism.
Buck proposes that neo-racism is constructed in three ways: first, that "we" in the political and cultural systems are superior to others because we are different, and that this difference involves all aspects of daily life; second, that "we" identify specifically with our way of life, which creates a strong emotional boundary between "them" and "us"; and third, that other cultures are pathological because they cause problems for "us". These three points bring about "real fear." We only feel safe in our own way of life. It has led to seemingly diverse cultures that do not communicate with each other, drawing the ground as a prison, and also allowing different ethnic groups of human beings to build emotional walls.
In the report on the new crown pneumonia, the Article "China is a Patient in Asia" in the Western media opened the prelude to the mutual expulsion of journalists between China and the United States. In fact, the current understanding of the "sick man of East Asia" is completely different from the era when Yan Fu said that "the Chinese are also the sick man". In any case, the term "Asian patient" will make people imagine a group of people who are physically weak and mentally weak from the cultural, economic, and ideological aspects. The "Sick Man of East Asia" was rebuilt in various anti-Japanese tv dramas to form an image of "self-Orientalism". On the one hand, it seems to stimulate the spirit of self-improvement and resistance to external humiliation of the Chinese people through the establishment of this image, and on the other hand, it creates a self-dwarfing image through repeated low-quality production under the logic of consumerism. When it is combined with the goal of cultural consumption into a scar of national internalization, any symbolic borrowing of external culture produces a strong emotional response. The Wall Street Journal article used inappropriate words, but the editor of the article believes that "the patient of Asia" is a common term that is often described between many European countries. In fact, even the use of "Asian patients" in some academic journals to describe diseases and health problems in China is not uncommon. As a result, the Western media rationalized their behavior in a way that was culturally misunderstood. This explanation reflects the strangeness and estrangement of Chinese culture in the Western media when describing the China problem.
In the face of disease, another noteworthy phenomenon of cultural relativism under the new racist thinking is the use of the symbol of "masks". In the general perception of the people in Europe and the United States, masks are protective tools used by patients to prevent infection with others, and wearing masks symbolizes patients. In the culture and common perception of Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea, wearing a mask is to protect yourself, not to mean that you are a patient. However, the nationalistization of the concept of hygiene has caused both sides to cling to their own cultural concepts, only on the boundary of self-security, and no longer try to communicate and communicate. If under racist thinking, ethnic groups are glaring at each other and isolated from each other in the face of disease, then in today's era of globalization, the metaphor of inter-ethnic communication under the new racism is the person who wears a mask: whether the spread of the disease reaches every individual or not, we are already patients in each other's eyes. (End) (Source: Southern Network)
Author/Ji Li
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